17 August 20
Motivating a Few Donations Today is Imperative
Really need to get the August fundraiser moving. Super important!
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16 August 20
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Al Franken | Facebook Does It Again
Al Franken, Al Franken's Website
Franken writes: "I told him that I had found it ironic that a company that prides itself on being part of Big Data - a company whose business model is providing advertisers with more data than had ever been compiled in the history of mankind prior to a couple months ago - could not put together 'rubles' with 'paid for by Russians.'"
fter it came out that, during the 2016 campaign, Facebook had carried pro-Trump and anti-Hillary ads paid for by the GRU Russian intelligence agency, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing with top executives from Google, Twitter, and Facebook.
It is against the law for foreigners to contribute to an American political campaign, and creating ads and buying ad space is, of course, considered a campaign contribution. In his opening testimony, Facebook’s general counsel testified that Facebook had not been aware that the Russians had bought ads. When it came my turn to question, I turned my focus on him, noting that the Russians had paid for the ads in rubles. That’s right. The GRU paid Facebook in rubles.
I told him that I had found it ironic that a company that prides itself on being part of Big Data – a company whose business model is providing advertisers with more data than had ever been compiled in the history of mankind prior to a couple months ago – could not put together “rubles” with “paid for by Russians.”
Not surprisingly, he didn’t have a good answer.
But here’s what did surprise me. I asked him if Facebook would pledge not to take political ads in the future that were paid for in rubles. No, he said. He could not make that pledge.
Really? I tried a few more times. Finally, he said his reason for not agreeing not to take ads in rubles was that anyone can convert any currency to any other currency. “Why,” I followed up, “would anyone convert their currency to rubles?” Again, no good answer. Still, in the end, the general counsel for Facebook would not commit to rejecting political ads for American campaigns that are paid for in rubles.
This all brings me to last week’s Washington Post article about Trump ads currently being carried on Facebook. Five different fact-checking organizations – including the conservative CheckYourFacts, a part of the Tucker Carlson founded Daily Caller – have each concluded that Trump ads on Facebook, like the ones which falsely claim that Joe Biden has called for defunding police departments, are patently untrue.
While that may not surprise you, what is deeply disturbing is that Facebook is continuing to carry these ads deemed false. And not just by these organizations, but also by Facebook’s own fact-checking program founded in December 2016 in response to the sheer tonnage of mis-and-disinformation that the Trump camp had spewed on its platform during that year’s presidential campaign.
But wait! Not only that! It’s doing so without informing Facebook users who are being targeted by the ads that Facebook itself has determined to be blatantly deceptive even as the Trump campaign continues to churn out falsehoods, distortions, and bald-faced lies.
The Trump team can do so confidently because it is well aware that Facebook is giving the campaign permission to lie with complete impunity, all while providing the campaign with all the data I referred to in that hearing so that it can narrowly target deceptive ads tailored to slices of potential voters susceptible to each distinct morsel of their mountain of lying crap.
That is the particular piece of all this that gives lie to Facebook’s excuse for not bringing down these ads. Facebook argues that television and radio stations are free to choose whether or not to air political commercials that contain falsehoods. (And many choose not to.) But TV and radio cannot target their commercials with the micro-precision that Facebook can provide to its advertisers. That’s why the Russians were able to pay rubles to direct “Hillary is a racist” ads on Facebook to African Americans in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee who had somewhere along the line shown an interest in Black Lives Matter. And because TV and radio ads go out to far broader audiences, so broadcasters have no reason (or the ability) to finetune their targeting to that extent that Facebook does, so, any flagrant disinformation will be flagged by actual knowledgeable human beings.
After Trump posted a clip of his appearance on the Fox News Channel’s morning show, Fox and Friends, claiming that children “are almost immune from this disease,” both Facebook and Twitter took down the posts. The disease he was referring to was Covid-19, not Compulsive Mendacity Disorder.
Twitter also blocked Trump’s account until he removed the deceitful and clearly dangerous clip. Facebook did not. It did the least it could do. Of course.
Mail sorting machines. (photo: USPS)
ALSO SEE: House Accelerates Oversight of USPS, Demand Top Officials
Testify at 'Urgent' Hearing
Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting
Aaron Gordon, VICE
Gordon writes: "'This will slow mail processing,' a union official wrote on one of the documents announcing the machine removals."
he United States Postal Service proposed removing 20 percent of letter sorting machines it uses around the country before revising the plan weeks later to closer to 15 percent of all machines, meaning 502 will be taken out of service, according to documents obtained by Motherboard outlining the agency’s plans. USPS workers told Motherboard this will slow their ability to sort mail.
One of the documents also suggests these changes were in the works before Louis DeJoy, a top Trump donor and Republican fundraiser, became postmaster general, because it is dated May 15, a month before DeJoy assumed office and only nine days after the Board of Governors announced his selection.
The title of the presentation, as well as language used in the notice to union officials, undermines the Postal Service’s narrative that the organization is simply “mov[ing] equipment around its network” to optimize processing, as spokesperson Dave Partenheimer told Motherboard on Thursday. The May document clearly calls the initiative an “equipment reduction.” It makes no mention of the machines being moved to other facilities. And the notice to union officials repeatedly uses the same phrase. Multiple sources within the postal service told Motherboard they have personally witnessed the machines, which cost millions of dollars, being destroyed or thrown in the dumpster. USPS did not respond to a request for comment.
In May, the USPS planned to remove a total of 969 sorting machines out of the 4,926 it had in operation as of February for all types of letters and flat mail. The vast majority of them—746 out of 3,765 in use—were delivery bar code sorters (DBCS), the type that sort letters, postcards, ballots, marketing mail and other similarly sized pieces. But a subsequent document distributed to union officials in mid-June said 502 of those machines would be removed from facilities.
The May document, titled “Equipment Reduction,” breaks down the exact number of machines the USPS slated to remove by region and facility. Although the document uses terms like “proposed reduction” and “reduction plan” and does not reflect the USPS’s final plan, it provides a general picture of the sweeping changes previously reported by Motherboard about mail sorting machines being removed around the country. It also shows that USPS management is undertaking a broad reduction of the agency’s ability to sort and process all types of mail, except for packages which have been steadily increasing in recent years before booming during the pandemic.
Further, the timeline of the May document did not come to pass. It proposed a plan resulting in the machines being removed by the end of July, but that didn’t happen. Interviews with six postal workers and union officials around the country, who spoke to Motherboard on condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak to the media, revealed these machine removals are still occurring in Michigan, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Texas.
More machine removals are planned in the months ahead. The document sent to union officials in June shows an updated plan to extend the machine removal timeline through the first quarter of 2021.
Motherboard also viewed documents from the same region that laid out detailed plans to reroute mail to sorting facilities further away in order to centralize mail processing even if it moves the mail across further distances. To the union officials, the result of these plans was clear: “This will slow mail processing,” one wrote in large font.
The move to slash the agency’s mail-sorting capacity just as the post office prepares to play a pivotal role in the upcoming election has raised alarm among elected officials. On Wednesday, 47 Senators sent a letter to DeJoy urging him “not to take any action that makes it harder and more expensive for Americans to vote.”
The removal of so many letter-sorting machines also does little to quell concern that President Trump—who has stated his opposition to giving the USPS additional money to handle the election because he doesn’t want mail-in ballots to be properly handled and counted—is intentionally interfering in the USPS’s operations to achieve his desired ends.
“Donald Trump made clear that he is dismantling the Postal Service so he can steal the election by making it harder to vote by mail,” said Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, a signatory of the letter. “Removing 20 percent of the Postal Service’s sorting and processing equipment looks like another part of his plan to bulldoze a vital American institution just to cling to power.”
“The Trump Administration is launching an all-out war on the U.S. Postal Service,” said West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, another letter signatory. “Several weeks ago we learned they had unexpectedly announced closures of several West Virginia post offices. Then we learned of their plans to change the regulations surrounding the first class mail and election mail. Now we’re hearing reports that the post office is removing sorting machines and reducing capacity a few months before an election where we’ll see more mail-in ballots than ever before. This is insane.”
A still from Ed Markey's ad. (image: Ed Markey for Senate)
Lili Loofbourow | The Most Incomprehensibly Thrilling Ad of the 2020 Election So Far
Lili Loofbourow, Slate
Loofbourow writes: "At almost 3 minutes long, Ed Markey's 'Dealmaker' ad lasts an eternity by online standards. But it's stuffed with good hooks - 'there's an invisible contract we all signed at birth,' it begins, introducing the idea (threadbare and moth-eaten these days) that citizens deserve to expect things from their government. "
George Robinson, second from right, died after an encounter with the police in Jackson, Miss., in 2019. Three officers have been indicted on murder charges. (photo: NYT)
Three Mississippi Police Officers Charged With Murdering Black Man
Michael Levenson and Marie Fazio, Independent
Excerpt: "The officers caused George Robinson's death by pulling him from his car, throwing him headfirst onto the road, and then beating him, according to the indictment."
READ MORE
Teachers hold a '#Return2SchoolSafely' protest in Phoenix, Arizona, on 15 July. (photo: Ross D Franklin/AP)
Calls for Nationwide Sickout as Arizona School District Cancels Reopening
Lois Beckett, Guardian UK
Beckett writes: "An Arizona public school district was forced to cancel its plans to reopen on Monday after more than 100 teachers and other staff members called in sick."
READ MORE
Companies are adapting their artificial intelligence products with the hope they can help schools reopen amid the pandemic. (photo: George Frey/Getty Images)
The Dystopian Tech That Companies Are Selling to Help Schools Reopen Sooner
Rebecca Heilweil, Vox
Heilweil writes: "Thousands of schools nationwide will not be reopening this fall. But in Las Vegas, the private K-12 Meadows School plans to use an artificial intelligence-powered thermal screening system to keep students safe as they return to classes."
Dream of Wild Health farm manager Jessika Greendeer gives a soil lesson to local youth July 15 in Minneapolis. (photo: Dream of Wild Health)
The Pandemic Is Exposing the Rotten Core of Our Industrial Food System
Joseph Bullington, In These Times
Bullington writes: "The yellow-brown compost has been heaped into hills taller than the nearby bulldozers. The piles don't look like pigs, but that's what they are. Pigs and woodchips. "
While industrial farms have been thrown into chaos, local agriculture has proved to be a more resilient model.
he yellow-brown compost has been heaped into hills taller than the nearby bulldozers. The piles don’t look like pigs, but that’s what they are. Pigs and woodchips.
It’s mid-May and thousands of hogs have been killed and tossed in a woodchipper on this farm field in Nobles County, Minnesota. They represent but a fraction of the number of animals that have met such an end here in the third-highest hog-producing state in the country. The Minnesota Department of Agriculture said on May 6 that at least 10,000 hogs were being slaughtered and discarded every day, but no one knows the real number. The state set up the Nobles County compost site, but it’s not required to track all the killings due to a technicality, says Michael Crusan, communications director for the Minnesota Board of Animal Health. “There isn’t an animal disease issue,” he explains. “It’s just a depopulation due to market conditions.”
“Market conditions” does not mean everyone has enough to eat. In Minnesota and across the country, surging need has overwhelmed food banks. Some supermarkets limit meat purchases to prevent shelves from becoming bare. In the Minneapolis Star Tribune, one letter writer pleads for hunters to be allowed to butcher the wasted hogs, to save at least some of the meat from the woodchipper.
“Market conditions,” in this case, means meat processing plants, including the JBS pork plant in nearby Worthington, have shut down because of Covid-19 outbreaks among workers. The Worthington plant alone, which previously processed 20,000 hogs a day, has been tied to more than 700 Covid-19 cases.
The assembly line of industrial food, however, extends far beyond the processing plants. The closures have left many industrial pig farmers, who raise and ship out hogs on a regimented schedule, with nowhere to send their market-ready animals. With the next batch of hogs ready to fill the cages behind them and no other way to get the meat to hungry people, the farmers have little choice but to grind the animals into compost.
According to John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Missouri, this failure is not a fluke of the pandemic but a weakness fundamental to the industrial food system. By extending the factory’s fixation on economic efficiency to the farm, industrialism has cut flexibility and diversity out of agriculture. Ikerd says a factory can’t slaughter 20,000 hogs a day, every day, without an inflexible schedule of when hogs are bred, born, fattened and shipped. Just as it’s more efficient to have workers each make a single repetitive cut on an assembly line than it is to have each butcher a whole hog, it’s more efficient to have a farmer raise thousands of hogs in a concentrated animal feeding operation (known as a CAFO) or only grow acres of corn than it is to raise a variety of livestock, chickens and vegetables. Despite some obvious problems, the industrial food system is a marvel of efficiency — until something goes wrong.
Ikerd puts it this way: “We’ve got a more operationally efficient system, but it’s a very fragile system.” Covid-19, he says, is one of many different scenarios that could bring it all crashing down.
Across the country we’ve seen chickens killed en masse, milk dumped, fields of vegetables plowed under. At the same time, we’ve seen the empty shelves, the cars lining up outside food banks.
As the pandemic has shaken the rickety scaffolding of industrial agriculture, it has woken many of us to the fragility of this system — and our dependence on it.
This spring, garden shops across the country sold out of seeds and seedlings. Local farmers and small-scale meat processors saw a surge of interest as people sought alternatives to industrial food. Farms that practice community-supported agriculture (CSA) — a model in which people buy “shares” of a farmer’s harvest at the beginning of a growing season and later receive weekly fresh food boxes — sold out and filled their waiting lists.
The surging interest in local food may not make up all the losses small farms are suffering, but it has been a lifeline for many. And it just might help the country make a long-term shift toward a more sustainable, more resilient and more just food system.
Shared Risk, Shared Reward
In mid-March, about a month before pork plant closures left industrial hog farmers stranded, Minnesota closed public schools—a crucial market for Open Hands Farm in Northfield, Minnesota. Instead of hogs, though, Ben Doherty and Erin Johnson were left holding more than 9,000 pounds of carrots.
Doherty and Johnson grow vegetables for local markets on their small organic farm. Carrot sales to schools account for a large share of their business, so they had to improvise. They explained their predicament on Facebook and offered 25-pound bags of carrots, direct to customers, at wholesale prices. They sold out within a day.
As the weather warmed, it remained unclear when schools would re-open, but Doherty and Johnson had to make decisions about planting. They pushed ahead with their usual crops, planning to find alternative markets if needed. To hedge their bets, they also increased their CSA offerings from 180 shares to 220.
Carrie Sedlak, executive director of the FairShare CSA Coalition based in Madison, Wis., says this “nimbleness” makes local agriculture more resilient than industrial food systems. As Covid-19 lockdowns hit, many of the coalition’s 44 member farms (scattered across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa) lost school and restaurant markets and had to lean more heavily on the CSA side of their operations.
The CSA model feels uniquely sturdy in the time of Covid-19. CSAs help small farmers, who operate on thin margins, adapt to shifting markets by putting money in their pockets upfront, when they need it most. The farmers distribute food straight to local people, who can pick up a CSA share outdoors with minimal contact. Most importantly, the model doesn’t paper over the financial risks of farming — it acknowledges them and asks the community to share the burden. If something goes wrong, CSA customers might receive different or fewer items than expected, but their boxes wouldn’t be empty, unlike store shelves during the pandemic.
In exchange for shouldering some of the risk, the participant enjoys a rare kind of food security. “You know the farmer and you know this person grows food locally,” Sedlak says. “It feels more secure than relying on this big, nebulous system.”
For these reasons, Sedlak thinks, CSAs have seen a surge in interest. This spring, all but the biggest farms in the coalition sold out of shares.
Crisis And Opportunity
When Virginia instituted its stay-at-home order in late March, it closed not only universities, schools and restaurants but also farmers markets, another pillar of local food systems.
“Those closures instilled a lot of panic on farms,” says Kristen Suokko, executive director of Local Food Hub in Charlottesville.
In addition to hardship, Ikerd thinks the food disruptions are creating opportunities for systemic change.
Since the pandemic hit, online grocery sales in the United States have soared. Amazon, Walmart and Target have racked up the vast majority of customers in the past year, but when it comes to selling food online, Ikerd says local producers enjoy significant advantages over food corporations. For example, local farmers can supply fresh food to local customers more efficiently than state or regional operations because they don’t have to spend nearly as much money on transportation, packaging and marketing. (In the current industrial food system, 85 cents of every dollar spent on food goes to marketing while only 15 cents goes to the farmer, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.) If local farmers could tap the burgeoning online market rather than battling for room in the mainstream distribution and retail systems, Ikerd says, then local producers and their customers could “totally bypass the industrial food system.”
That’s just what some local food groups have begun to do, out of necessity as much as out of a long-term vision.
Within days of Virginia’s stay-at-home order, Local Food Hub launched drive-thru markets to comply with Covid-19 regulations. Customers could order food online from a variety of local farms and pick it up twice a week.
“Demand was incredible in those first two months,” Suokko says. “Some farmers have said it was the lifeline that kept them going.”
In Wyoming, Slow Food of the Tetons found similar success when it moved its usual year-round farmers market online. Slow Food’s executive director, Scott Steen, says the market, based in Jackson Hole, offers food from 28 farms and saw as many as 200 orders in a good week.
“The online market has sold way more food than we would’ve sold at a winter farmers market,” Steen adds — and it’s served as an essential alternative for local farmers who lost buyers during the pandemic.
Self-organizing To Feed Each Other
Not every neighborhood, however, has a farmers market — or even a grocery store. Tens of millions of Americans live in food deserts, which are primarily in poor neighborhoods, rural areas and communities of color.
Shania Morris sees this lack of access to food as a kind of violence. Morris is an organizer with Soil Generation, a Black- and brown-led coalition of growers in Philadelphia that fights for food justice and food sovereignty.
“Black people are not only dying at the hands of police,” Morris says. “They are dying because of lack of access to healthy food and healthcare, and because they’re being overworked.
“Our supermarkets and our jobs systems don’t meet the needs of everyone,” Morris says. “In this community, we’re finding ways to do that outside of capitalism.” The group works to shape urban agricultural policy, increase access to land and help neighborhoods build gardens on what land they do have — work that’s become more urgent as people have lost income.
Enlylh King, a Soil Generation coordinator, lives communally and grows food for herself, her friends and her neighborhood. King thinks the pandemic has made people more interested in independence from oppressive systems, including the industrial food chain.
“We don’t want to get to the point where we’re so dependent on this thing that’s so far outside of ourselves that we can’t even take care of ourselves,” King says.
Morris says growing food as a means of building sovereignty is nothing new to Black communities. In 1920, almost a million farms in the United States were Black-owned—14% of all farms. But as systemic racism dispossessed Black communities, that number plunged. As of 2017, only 35,470 farms in the United States were Black-operated—1.7% of all farms.
“We’ve always been needed, we’ve always been here,” Morris says of Black growers. “Now, this moment has shown the truth of what we’ve been saying for a very long time.”
In Minneapolis, the Indigenous-led nonprofit Dream of Wild Health, which runs a 10-acre farm north of the city, partnered with other groups to deliver meals to the Twin Cities Native community during this time of crisis.
Neely Snyder, Dream of Wild Health executive director, says nonperishable food offered by many pantries — while meeting some immediate needs — is “not the healthiest stuff.” She thinks that makes her group’s mission to deliver fresh, healthy, minimally processed foods even more essential.
Every year, the farm distributes more than seven tons of vegetables and fruits by way of youth programs, farmers markets, partnerships with Indigenous chefs and its CSA-style Indigenous Food Share. This spring, as people lost jobs and access to food, Dream of Wild Health planted earlier than usual in anticipation of increased need, says farm manager Jessika Greendeer. Normally, parts of the farm lie fallow, Greendeer says, but this year they planted every available inch with summer squash, cucumbers, corn, tomatoes, winter squash and beans.
Dream of Wild Health makes its food available at less than the “normal farmers market price,” Snyder says. Other local-food nonprofits offer similar programs to make local food more accessible. The FairShare CSA coalition, for example, will pay for half a CSA share for low-income people. Slow Food of the Tetons distributes a localized version of food stamps, and unlike the federal SNAP program, it’s available to undocumented people.
Suokko says this approach has limits. “We’ve been hugely effective at making local food available through philanthropy,” she says. “We’ve not been successful at making it so, if you’re a low-income person, you can go to a local store and buy a local tomato.”
“The Transition Is Already Well Underway”
For local food systems to overgrow the fringes and reclaim a central role in how we eat, we need more farms growing diverse crops and raising animals to feed people who live in their area. And the food needs to be accessible and affordable.
Unfortunately, Sedlak says, “Capitalism tends toward consolidation, not diversification.”
Capitalism is aided by federal farm policy, which funnels assistance and subsidies almost exclusively to big, mono-crop commodity farms. Diversified farms that produce vegetables and fruits, known to the Department of Agriculture as “specialty crops,” do not qualify for federal subsidies or crop insurance.
“The very fact that fruits and vegetables are labeled ‘specialty crops’ in USDA parlance tells you everything,” Suokko says. Only 2% of U.S. farmland grows fruits and vegetables while almost 60% grows commodities like soybeans and corn. Some of those sprawling fields will eventually have to be restored and diversified, unless we want to plow what little is left of the American grasslands. (Which isn’t much: In Illinois, for example, only 2,500 acres of prairie remain, of an original 22 million.)
North of Minneapolis, Dream of Wild Health is scaling up. Before the state’s lockdown order took effect, the group purchased an additional 20-acre farm. Greendeer and her team are busy restoring the land, which has been in mono-crop corn rotations the past two seasons. She hopes it will be ready for planting in 2021.
According to Ikerd, the federal farm support system should stop subsidizing the industrial food system and instead support small, diversified farms, along with those conventional farmers who are able to transition. “If,” he says, “they still remember how to manage a farm rather than a biological factory.” We are also, Ikerd says, going to have to “grow a lot of new farmers” and give them access to land.
According to Sedlak, the main barriers that keep people from farming are a lack of access to affordable land and a lack of capital to start. Not all farmers have access to grants and donations, which is how Dream of Wild Health, for example, funded its expansion. The need is particularly great in Black communities, Indigenous communities and others that have been systematically deprived of access to land and sovereignty over their food.
We have become so dependent on the industrial food system that it’s difficult to imagine a world without it, but Ikerd takes a more optimistic view. “The transition to the new local, sustainable food systems is already well underway,” he says. “We just need government policies and public institutions to support it.”
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